Professors Turn to Oral Exams to Combat AI Cheating

[former9thward]

When the pandemic closed classrooms in March of 2020 and forced remote teaching, a top engineering student at the University of California, San Diego, anxiously expressed concern to a professor that her classmates would cheat, bend the class curve and lower her grade.

Prof. Huihui Qi considered the dilemma and introduced a testing method with a 2,000-year-old record that is today largely ignored: oral exams. “The students were nervous,” Qi said. “None of them had taken exams like this before.”

That initiative led to a three-year research experiment which has now stretched across 7,000 oral exams. It comes as a wave of professors around the world are experimenting with oral exams to improve teaching and learning and to discourage cheating.

Qi believes the exams can push students past rote memorization, prompt them to think on their feet and reveal a student’s conceptual understanding of the subject matter better than most written exams. They are also very hard to hack.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-colleges-cheating-oral-exams-286e0091

[no_hypocrisy]

1. As a music major, I chose a thesis AND

a recital over oral exams 45+ years ago.

Besides, the chair of the department and I despised each other. He would’ve failed me and prevented my graduating.

[Delmette2.0]

3. Oral exams are also good practical experience for job interviews. nt

[spooky3]

4. That's unlikely to work in business school classes

Which generally have 30 to more than 250 students per section.

[ProfessorGAC]

7. We Had Them In Undergrad Organic & Physical Chemistries

96 students in Organic 201, 40 something in 202. P-Chem was, as one would expect, much smaller. 10-12 students in 301 & 302.
Advanced Organic was even easier. There were only me & 3 others in the class.
It was a very rigorous schedule for the professor in Organic, although seniors taking Adv Org took some of the load.
That said, these were weeklies, so there were only a couple questions per week. Maybe even just one.
Comprehensive oral exams would be a much bigger issue.

[Scrivener7]

5. Bring back blue books! AI can't fill those suckers out for you!

[crickets]

6. +1

[ProfessorGAC]

8. Had Those, Too

I mentioned orals in chem, above.
Blue books were every 3 weeks, and usually covered about 8 problems.
Same in calculus.

[Grammy23]

9. Oh, Lordy! Do I remember blue books?

I had a sociology prof who really liked using them. Luckily I was a pretty good wordsmith so filling in pages was no problem. But the fear and worry was very real knowing the clock was ticking. I ended up having a real aptitude for the subject and that was my major with a minor in anthropology. The blue books were required for certain types of exams and I still remember the anticipation and stress of writing something coherent and correct!

[cab67]

12. no....

...but if the exam isn't done in a classroom, a student can copy down something generated by AI.

They were already copying down web sites, verbatim and without citation, in their blue books.

(Blue books were widely used for take-home exams.)

[Scrivener7]

17. Then have the exam in a classroom.

[cab67]

21. at which point a blue book is not needed.

any blank sheet of paper is sufficient.

The blue books sold in campus bookstores were often intended for take-home essay exams.

[Scrivener7]

25. .

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

28. Not true.

Professors used blue books all the time in the old days for in-class exams, because it kept the pages of each student's exam neatly together, with no need for staplers or paper clips, both of which are not always ideal for keeping all of the pages of one student's test together.

I was a grader for a college department, and it was shocking how often even stapled assignments and tests could come apart, just from clanging around in a briefcase or backpack. That was nothing, though. One drop of the folder onto a hard floor, and you might be spending an hour or more trying to piece together which pages went with which student's work.

And yes, that happened to me, more often than I care to admit, thanks to having a bad case of the dropsies when I had Graves disease. I could drop anything in those days. And did. Lost lots of china and crystal to it, fortunately not the heirloom kind.

[skip fox]

24. Yes. I was an Eng. prof for 37 years.

In freshmen writing classes, to make sure students were writing their own papers, I'd have them write 2-3 in-class essays. If students need extra time, I'd arrange for that.

Sophomore classes would have in-class exams including objective and essay sections requiring bluebooks

[honest.abe]

10. This is basically the solution.

Tests and written assignments in class.

[Raftergirl]

11. Almost all my college exams ((except large 100 level intro courses) were blue book essay exams.

Not easy to cheat with that type of exam. Oral exams can be very useful but mainly in small seminar type classes.

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

30. Same here

I actually preferred those tests.

But I was the weirdo who test prepped by creating essay questions from my class notes that I suspected might show up at exam time, then writing answers to them. If you pay attention in class, and then to what you see in the first few assignments, it's rather easy to guess what a prof will emphasize in a test. A good chunk of my academic success in college was "reading" my professors for tells, and then playing to those weaknesses.

You can do that in squishy liberal arts majors.

[cab67]

13. This won't be widely adopted.

It's not just because they'd be pain in the ass to administer. It's because the number of students with accommodations would escalate.

Oral exams might be especially problematic for students prone to panic or anxiety attacks, for hearing- or visually-impaired students (depending on what's being asked), or students on the autism spectrum.

We already provide extra time and isolated quiet spaces for students with various learning issues to take exams - and atmost universities, the bulk of these accommodations falls on the instructors. Somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the students in our classes might be entitled to some sort of accommodation. We're happy to provide them - it's our job, and it's ethically and morally right - but for a class of 200, that's upward of 20 students with accommodations. That's in addition to students who get sick, have to attend funerals, have court dates or job interviews, or have any of the other legitimate reasons for missing an exam. We have to find times and places that work for their busy schedules and ours. And bear in mind, the vast majority of us instructors have never received so much as an hour of instruction on working with special-needs students. Anything that would expand the number of students needing accommodations will most likely get some blowback from instructors.

I agree wholeheartedly that this would be a great panacea against digital cheating. I just suspect the number of classes where it could be used effectively would be limited.

[Warpy]

15. it's a pain in the ass to read a bunch of term papers and grade exams

This might get the whole thing done in less time.

[cab67]

22. not sure it would work out that way.

We'd still have to listen to each student's exam, and that would take far more time than monitoring a room full of students writing out their answers.

Moreover, we'd still have to assess what we heard.

And another problem arises - accountability. With a paper exam, we can always go back and check how things were graded, making changes as needed.

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

29. People speak at the rate of 150 wpm, on average

College professors easily read at 3 times that rate, if not far higher. So they can get those papers graded at a much faster rate than asking the questions, then waiting to get the answers in return.

I've been on both sides of school work--the doing it, and the grading of it. Oral exams are a massive PITA. The scheduling of them alone is an administrative headache for grad school as it is, and would be an outright nightmare to arrange them with undergrads, too. Those huge classes of 200? Nobody has enough proctors or TAs to conduct all the orals that would be necessary for those, never mind the other, smaller classes needing them, too.

The one thing that works, is going back to the future: Conduct in-class blue book exams. That's the sure way to find out what your students have learned from the material, with the bonus of eliminating the threat of AI at the same time.

Of course, that will mean teaching kids handwriting again. But that wouldn't be a bad thing, IMO.

[meadowlander]

16. It also disadvantages neurodiverse students.

I'm autistic and got straight As in college but I would have flunked out in my first semester if I had to take oral exams.

[Elessar Zappa]

26. I wouldn't have gotten through college if

the majority of tests were oral exams. I have severe social anxiety, when I took Speech, I dreaded every class meeting.

[XanaDUer2]

32. Me too nt

[Elessar Zappa]

27. I probably wouldn't have gotten through college if

the majority of tests were oral exams. I have severe social anxiety, when I took Speech, I dreaded every class meeting.

[Warpy]

14. I think he's onto something

Cheating has been epidemic for a long time, from Cliff's Notes to purchased papers, to paying smart nerds to take exams for stupid rich kids. The internet made it easier. Oral testing would make this harder to do.

[Scrivener7]

18. I think we're going to have to go back to a lot of old, non-tech methods.

In many, many areas. And I don't think that's a bad thing.

[Ms. Toad]

19. It is not a one-size fits all solution -

It would not work well for math/physics/computer science (all of which I've taught) for example. But most of my law school teacing is one big oral exam (the socratic method). I know the strengths and weaknesses of my students far better from those exchanges than I do from their performances on exams (which typically require memorization rather than learning, and are under significant time pressure).

I don't know that I would try to run final exams that way . . . thinking of the logistics of scheduling 30+ individual exams for two or three classes during finals week. But I might be tempted to largely eliminate final exams.

There are valid concerns raised below about this format favoring students who think better on their feet, and are neurotypical. But there are equally strong concerns related to how we test now.

[AwakeAtLast]

20. Mine are Aural

I'm a Music Teacher.

[dalton99a]

23. Kick

https://archive.ph/YDtk9

[dembotoz]

31. terminal introvert...i would suck at that